San Francisco was rocked Friday by the powerful punch of the biggest winter storm in two years with high winds and heavy rains disrupting transit service, causing widespread power outages and road and bridge closures.

Burlingame property owners may ultimately be pinned with a bill for a likely settlement that could reach into the millions of dollars for the city’s alleged spilling of millions of gallons of sewage into by Mike Rosenberg

As one environmental group is reaching a settlement with Burlingame about the alleged spilling of sewage into the Bay, another group gave a 60-day notice Thursday to a developer of 17 homes on by Staff Report

Residents on Ringwood Avenue west of U.S. Highway 101 say that a pedestrian bridge linking their neighborhood to the community across the highway on the east side has become a conduit for crime — one they want destroyed.

San Mateo County officials are giving away sandbags at 25 locations. Call the local public works department:

A great city walk — Japantown, Urban Renewal and Fillmore Jazz: See Japanese architecture next to classic Victorians and learn about the rebirth of African-American culture in the Fillmore Jazz Preservation District. Offered first and third Saturdays at 2 p.m. Meet at the Peace Pagoda on Buchanan between Post and Geary.

No witnesses were presented this week in defense of the man accused of running down at least 17 people on the streets and sidewalks of San Francisco more than a year ago as his preliminary hearing came to a close.

Bay Area Rapid Transit service between the 24th Street-Mission station in San Francisco and the Daly City station is still shut down today due to downed trees on the tracks, with no estimate for reopening, BART spokesman Jim Allison said.

Blustery weather is causing delays and cancellations at all three major Bay Area airports today.

A Silicon Valley startup is promising to blanket San Francisco with free wireless Internet service, reviving a crusade that crumbled last year after two much larger companies, EarthLink Inc. and Google Inc., scrapped their plans to build a high-speed network for Web surfing.

Dezzirae Cafferata wants you to know she has nothing to do with the wardrobe.

With John York in charge, the 49ers have no hope. This week’s comic opera, with Mike Nolan returning as coach and Scot McCloughan becoming general manager, is only the latest example of York’s incompetence. It makes no sense from either a football or business standpoint.

"There Will Be Blood" is a capital-"A" art film concerned with weighty subjects and front-loaded with a big performance by Daniel Day-Lewis as fictitious oil man by Staff Report

You made a resolution of no alcohol for an entire month. OK, that’s extreme, you told yourself — just two weeks on the wagon. But here you are, five days into January, the weather is terrible (at least as of this writing) and there is nothing you would like more than a glass of red wine.

In what is sure to trigger a seismic shift of Bay Area politics, 14-term Congressman Tom Lantos, 79, made the shocking announcement this week that he will not seek re-election in November because he has been diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus.

NVIDIA Corp. (NVDA) fell more than 8.4 percent Friday, the biggest change seen among local stocks tracked by the Examiner.

Henry Doelger and the Gellert brothers were not the only visionaries eager to transform the sand dunes of the Sunset into real-estate gold.

Long before either started buying up land west of Twin Peaks, big-time San Francisco developer Fernando Nelson tried his luck with a plot of land just south of Golden Gate Park, in what is now the central Sunset.

He personally remembers a time when anyone mentioning that idea to corporations was greeted only with skeptical looks.

Exotic animals will perform laps of their tanks and terrariums in front of hordes of gawking families this weekend before being put on stretchers, bagged and boxed up for a massive move from the California Academy of Sciences’ temporary home in the Financial District to its new digs in Golden Gate Park.

Here’s a rare example of a remake that’s good: "3:10 to Yuma," the Russell Crowe and Christian Bale Western about a dangerous gunslinger and a desperate farmer who form an uneasy alliance in the deadly frontier. While the original film was a winner, the remake is better, featuring an awesome performance by Crowe — but Bale manages to best him.